The Harry Potter books suggest that the world we see is only part of the story: Ms. Rowling shows us a parallel world that goes on all around us, where none of the “normal” rules of nature apply. In the same way, any language-learner who chooses to study the lyrics of pop, rock, country & western, jazz, r&b, soul, rap or blues songs will find a world of English grammar that has very little in common with the language you have spent years dutifully studying in school-books.
For a start, you’ll hear “I got…” over and over again. And it isn’t the past simple tense. “I got rhythm”, “I got you, babe”, “I got soul and I’m superbad” are all sentiments that, in your English teachers’ boring Muggle world, would be expressed with the present tense idiom “I’ve got…” (or simply “I have”).
Then there’s “He don’t/ She don’t/ It don’t”, the sort of thing that your English teacher would attack with a thick red pen; but songs are full of it, from Duke Ellington’s 1931 classic “It don’t mean a thing…” to Nina Simone’s famous opening line “My baby don’t care for clothes…” to the Kings of Leon’s “It Don’t Matter”. “Doesn’t” doesn’t seem to be at home in popular-music world…
The remarkable thing is that the grammar of these lyrics doesn’t strike the average Anglophone, or even the highly-educated Anglophone, as “wrong”. That’s because it isn’t. In its context, this alternative version of English grammar is consistent, perfectly “normal”, and has been respected by many of the most literate song-writers of the last century.
This is non-standard English, a variety of the language that is not considered appropriate in letters from your bank manager, newspapers, computer instruction manuals or legal documents, but which flows through the history of popular music culture, paying tribute to its origins in the dialects spoken by the African-Americans who invented the blues (and their descendants), the working-class white Americans whose folk music mixed with the blues to produce rock and roll, and their ancestors and counterparts in various regions of the British Isles. All of the above had in their vocabulary a word that you’ll be familiar with if you listen to any of the types of music I mentioned before, but which you will never see in an English language text book: Ain’t.
Ain’t can be the opposite of “am”,“is”,“are”,“have” or “has”. Ellington’s song’s full title is “It don’t mean a Thing (If It Ain’t [Hasn’t]Got That Swing)”, Bob Dylan sang “It Ain’t [Isn’t] me, Babe”, and Ike and Tina Turner’s “Ain’t [There isn’t] No Mountain High Enough” highlights another property of this impressively versatile word: at the start of a sentence it can do what Italian and Spanish verbs do – imply a missing subject: think of Nina Simone’s hit “Ain’t Got No – I Got Life”. (You’ll notice in these last 2 examples another non-standard characteristic of popular music texts – they enthusiastically embrace that cardinal sin of standard English, the double negative – the words ain’t and no are frequent neighbours.)
Ain’t seems to have originated as a negative form of am. You must have noticed that am – unlike is and are – doesn’t have a negative contracted form. Amn’t I? / I amn’t only exists in Irish English; the rest of us, avoiding the difficult “-mnt” consonant cluster, say I’m not, and use the weird and illogical question form Aren’t I? But long ago “I amn’t” was, apparently, re-modelled into “I an’t”.
At about the same time (around the end of the 17th century) the other negative forms of be and have started to migrate in the same direction – aren’t was often written as an’t in parts of England where the “r” wasn’t pronounced before a consonant, and hasn’t and haven’t were shortened to ha’n’t, which lost its “h” to become another an’t.
An’t evolved into ain’t, a word that 19th-century novelists and playwrights used, not only in the dialogue they wrote, but also, apparently, in their own letters and conversations. Ain’t at this time had the status that contractions like isn’t and aren’t have today – ok for use by educated people, but only in informal and colloquial situations. Gradually, though, the word came to be associated nearly exclusively with working class colloquial use – in England it was particularly linked to the Cockney dialect of London – and was relegated to its current “non-standard” (or even “sub-standard”) status. This means that, in an English exam, the examiners don’t want to see it, even if they ask you to write an informal letter.
There are certain forms in which ain’t emerges into the daylight of standard (colloquial) English. “That ain’t bad!” you might say, in a jokey sort of way, and there’s a modern proverb that ignores standard verb forms and contractions – “If it ain’t broke [isn’t broken] , don’t fix it!” Then there’s the expression “You ain't
seen nothing yet!” – meaning, “I’ve shown you something good, but, if you wait, I’ll show you something even better” - which was the catchphrase of early-20th-century entertainer Al Jolson, and is famous as (more or less) the first sentence ever spoken in a feature film (“The Jazz Singer”, 1927). This expression has been revived many times over the years, by politicians and marketing men; it’s a fixed phrase, which exploits the ultra-populist flavour of non-standard English: without ain’t , and the double negative, it just ain’t the same.
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